Menu

Monthly Archives: February 2013

Introduction

In my last blog post about SGen, Mono’s garbage collector, I wrote about concurrent mark-and-sweep, which makes most of the garbage collection work happen concurrently with the running program.

One thing we cannot do in a concurrent collector, as opposed to a stop-the-world collector, is move objects around in memory[1]. This is typically not a problem in a mark-and-sweep collector, but SGen goes beyond basic mark-and-sweep and prevents fragmentation by evacuating objects when the need arises.

Fragmentation is no less of an issue in a concurrent collector, so being unable to do evacuation is problematic. Our best solution at this point is to stop the world when it happens[2]. The threshold we use to decide when to do evacuation with concurrent mark-and-sweep is higher than on our non-concurrent collector, but there is still a chance that a full collection pause will hit the program when interactive speeds are desired.

The API

We’re introducing a new API in the Mono.Runtime class. The application can use it to ask the GC not to do full major collection pauses:

One possible use case would be a game, where you want the lowest latency possible while the player is in a level, but between levels, or during loads, a longer collection pause is not much of an issue. Note that there are still no guarantees about the lengths of the pauses—this is a best-effort approach, not a real-time garbage collector.

This API will be available in the next Mono release, but only via reflection. It will be a public API on mobile soon.

This is technically possible, but it involves using a read barrier, which would not only be forbiddingly complicated to implement in Mono, but would also probably incur a significant performance hit as well as break our embedding API. ↩

An approach that would keep marking mostly concurrent would be to decide which blocks to evacuate before starting concurrent mark, and then during marking to keep tabs on the references from already marked objects to objects within those blocks. In the finishing collection pause we could evacuate the marked objects in those blocks, but we’d have to update the references to them. Depending on the workload that might still require a significant pause. ↩